Giant Bomb New Site Feedback

Leave your Giant Bomb Beta feedback here!

If you found a bug please leave detailed information, you can follow the steps here on how to submit a detailed error report: https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/how-to-submit-a-detailed-error-report-1807614/

We've been working really hard on this for a while, we hope you like it!

I noticed this during the livestream, but Metal Gear Rising is above all the other games in the Metal Gear Scanlon category. I feel like it should be at the end of the list because of it being a spinoff.

Loving the new site even though I've only been able to poke at it a little bit. Definitely makes more sense, given the video-centric format of the site.

Would it be possible to make the headers clickable? Eg clicking Watchlist brings you to your Watchlist, or Latest brings you to the latest page, etc. instead of having to scroll to the end of the carousel to click on See More?

Edit: Also my account has been locked out due to too many failed login attempts, despite never having attempted to lock in on the beta site?

I’ve got an issue with ads covering UI on Chrome for Android:

Additionally, I can’t seem to login to the Beta site on my phone? It worked fine on my iPad, but my phone’s giving me ‘too many failures, you must reset your password’ messages—in spite of the fact that I didn’t enter the wrong password even once.

EDIT:

@david: ah, snap

Getting this before I even tried to log in for the first time.

EDIT: Seems like it works now!

On the podcasts page, using the carousel view: it seems to me that the carousel is scrolling backwards, ie. to the right. All of the other carousels on the site move to the left.

@david: Same problem here.

@david said:

Getting this before I even tried to log in for the first time:

same

@fobwashed said:

@david said:

Getting this before I even tried to log in for the first time:

same

Me too

The latest section thumbnails is too small and the extra text goes down vertically. If they can hide the extra text and just titles for mobile

On iPhone SE

Thumbnails completely covered up by timestamps or "premium," tag. Drastically reduces readability by defeating the purpose of the thumbnails. Also just feels cramped. Could be fixed with the carousel being less populated? The long column of text has redundant show names (in the actual title along with the show tag). The "time ago," seems unnecessary.

Trimming down this text and having less populated carousel would increase the size of the thumbnails and may alleviate the problem with the stamps.

I do want to take a moment and leave the feedback that I like the redesign as a whole. Y'all did great.

Got a responsive issue with the caravellasel. This might just be a missing 'display: flex' in '.js-carousel-strip__viewport carousel-strip__viewport' but I didn't get too much of a chance to play around with it.

I use autoscrolling on almost all websites. This is a feature you can enable in Firefox and extensions support it in Chrome. I can't autoscroll on the top part of the homepage because of the huge banner for ranking of fighters.

I autoscroll because I use a trackball mouse which has a poor scroll wheel. This is an accessibility issue for people like me.

@spectral said:

@fobwashed said:

@david said:

Getting this before I even tried to log in for the first time:

same

Me too

Same :\

@spectral said:

@fobwashed said:

@david said:

Getting this before I even tried to log in for the first time:

same

Me too

Yup

@kierkegaard said:

@spectral said:

@fobwashed said:

@david said:

Getting this before I even tried to log in for the first time:

same

Me too

Yup

Add me to the list.

Probably not a huge deal, but I've noticed videos now only say how long ago they were posted when looking at thumbnails instead of showing the date it was posted. Meaning you have to click on the video to get its post date. As someone who is finishing up watching things posted by date that makes it a bit challenging to quickly know if I'm even in the right month since things from 2015 just say "3 years ago" etc.

@kierkegaard said:

@spectral said:

@fobwashed said:

@david said:

Getting this before I even tried to log in for the first time:

same

Me too

Yup

What they said.

@sixtycakes:

I got that too, Chrome 70 (Version 70.0.3538.67 (Official Build) (64-bit)), Win7. Upon refresh, no longer an issue.

Also The carousel will forever be interpreted by me as the casserole.

Having an issue with show images and names getting squished on the home page in the following carousel:

1. Shows
2. This Day In Giant Bomb History
3. Latest

Chrome: Version 70.0.3538.67
Laptop: Window Surface Laptop (2256 x 1504)
OS: Windows 10

New things scare me...

As someone who has always used the light site... I will miss it. And same with the login thing - can't at the moment.

I'm really diggin the videos landing page, especially the show section. It's much cleaner, and I love the new logos!

I had a similar log-in error, but I'm assuming that's due to the beta status.

Amazing work guys!

Is the GB video player going away with this redesign or is that just part of the not being able to log-in bug?

I'm REALLY going to miss my Biggen and Fill Browser buttons if it's going away.

I was able to login, not sure if you just fixed it or if it was a weird fluke.

I highly welcome the new backend structuring for shows, this day in history, etc. great work on that front. Also combining the bombcast stuff & saving podcast locations are great.

I will also add I am a UX Designer and so I have strong opinions regarding visual design. I will definitely miss the light site. The problem with dark themes is that you have so few options for typography, and it really really shows on this version. Your light text fails contrast checkers for accessibility. People with poor eyesight or crappy monitors will really struggle reading majority of the site's text: https://i.gyazo.com/eee5313d9510f6a1c80c414181e07cb6.png (the tool: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/).

This whole "metro" style is bland and boring. GiantBomb.com currently has style and character and that all feels lost in this generic metro skin. Even simply adding back in the serif font used on this site might help it a lot.

The idea that the video name and description goes away when you hit play is baffling. Youtube, everything has it below the video. I don't know why it'd ever be an overlay, which is going to have contrast issues with whatever your thumbnail is, on the video that goes away. That's poor user experience - you're breaking the #1 rule of always letting people know where they are.

Overall padding and typography needs a ton of work. This looks like a wireframe or rough pass.

Just my 2c.

Just answered my own questions. It is a log in issue. After being able to log in, I can switch back to the GB player.

I'm happy. I'll never be mad again.

EDIT: Player is also permanently Biggen'd. You're making all the right decisions, crew.

Having the same issue as Flashflood with the many tiny thumbnails in the carousels. Ctrl + Mouse wheel scaling/zooming the page doesn't affect it. EDIT 2: Nevermind. Had nothing to do with script blocker. They just fixed it at the same time that I altered that. Also the failed login thing. Using Firefox 62.0.3 (64 bit) on Windows 10 if that's relevant to this.

Not trying to be discouraging or cliched, and I question whether there is anything constructive coming from me posting it, but my immediate first impression is that its messy.

This is what the home page looks like on my end. I am one of those filthy 21:9 monitor users (although I also use a 16:9 monitor and 4K TV as well) but I kinda use the browser in a 18:9 ratio on the 21:9? lol And I am a "Light" page scheme user so.. I may be unwelcome here.

Stuff doesn't feel appropriately framed.. if that makes any sense? When I first saw this I was like.. wait, is the jeff/jason stuff on its own side bar and the Player Select image its own video? At first glance I assumed the page formatting was bugging out. Also, the way the three video thumbnails at the bottom are cut in half.

Overall the page feels cluttered. I like how on the old page w/ "Light" scheme, the content list portion of the page is sort of sectioned off in the white area. Point is, the section of white contrasts well and isolates stuff like the Upcoming list which is in black, the top main videos section in black I guess, and then the top horizontal drop down bar and page logo/search bar header in the dark gray. All works well for me.

For comparison, this is how the old page looks on my end. IMO, this feels neat and organized. The white text for content titles contrasts well over the fade-in black edges on the thumbnails. The blue text when there is a live show helps it pop out as there is no other blue text seen here (but of course it could've been made more bold I suppose.) The yellow text differentiates the Giant Bomb Infinite link up there.

Having stuff organized by "Shows" is great and I believe you said something about you can sort of subscribe/get notifications to specific series? This is something I had been thinking of for a long time that YouTube should have implemented. Some YouTube channels have certain series that I enjoy and I'm not interested in anything else that the channel offers, so I don't want to subscribe and have all the stuff dumped into my subscriptions feed that I don't want to see. So hurray for Giant Bomb theoretically getting in on this idea before YouTube did. Unfortunately, I want to see most stuff on GB anyway so it isn't really applicable for me on this site lol

Anyway, that's my purely aesthetic feedback so far from someone who has no idea how to design a web page. The old setup mostly worked well for me, maybe just needed some tweaks like the "Shows" stuff etc. Obviously this redesign will happen anyway. Thanks for the work and I look forward to seeing more cool thumbnail art!

@suprst4r Listen to this dude. Basically said what I was trying to say but in a way that makes actual technical sense. Font styles, color contrasting, etc. That "Metro" style is a perfect comparison and probably why I don't necessarily like this setup at first. I'm not a fan of the Xbox or Windows Metro stuff. Bring back the Blades! *shakes fist*

Primary mobile user here running the beta on a iPhone XS Max using Safari

I feel like, the side scrolling when viewing the video thumbnails on a category could be a bit smoother and more responsive

And I kind of miss the forums section from the homepage

But other than that, still a super smart functional design overhaul

If possible please add a show page for all the Hitman 2016 videos! The main ones with Brad/Dan are surely connected enough to qualify, and there's various quick looks with Elusive Targets and the like as well. A few smaller segments are tucked into UPFs so might have to exclude those but like just one, well formatted page with the saga of the Double Agents would be HUGELY appreciated.

Clicking on the three bars at the top left gives me a black screen.

iPhone 6 Plus

iOS 10.3.3

Safari

I like the "This Year In" as that is a great idea for such a storied site.

I do wanna critique the drop down menus; some are wider than the tab but the arrow can still "lose" the dropdown easily.

@david: @flashflood_29: @sixtycakes: @ozzie: @spiritof: @ozzie: Hey y'all the login issue and the weird carousel display issue should be fixed now. We'll be looking through and addressing all of your feedback in the coming days, but until then I need to drink large but responsible amounts of alcohol

Is there a way to download videos on the new site?

Thanks for the work. It looks like there's a lot of good stuff in here! I have some thoughts about the project.

- I'd definitly enjoy a 'My Favorites' kind of show-container that you can populate with random episodes across shows. There are definitly moments where i feel like getting 1 big meaty podcast in & 2 smaller pieces of content for the night. Way more likely than i want to listen to two bombcasts back to back. Or i want to watch all Vinny FMV games spread across playdates, UPF's, homestreams and Choose your own adventure streams (remember that feature? it was great).

- Right now, GB infinite is part of the live section. Since that's ideally a 24/7 running livestream, will that mean that the live 'light' never goes out? That would be a mistake i feel. You want that button to signal something is happening live. You don't want people to assume that it's always on because of GB Infinite. Right now the blue text countdown stands out as the sole blue thing on the site & immediatly tells you something is happening. The red light should be similar i feel. I expect you guys already thought about this, but i'm just making sure given that the light is still up now whil the bombcast has been offline for a few hours already.

- I'm in support of the staff twitter list. I don't use twitter, so this is my one little doorway to seeing what the staff is up to. Especially regarding the public stuff Dan does on the side it helps a bunch. But also during E3 it's good to have.

- White stars for reviews? Feels so understated for something that you want people to notice instantly. I think gold is the colour of champions for a reason. You want it to pop out and be as shiny as an olympic medal. Seems like there's a consistancy issue now where the stars are white in the words section, but golden in the actual review sections.

- Regarding the forums. I understand with all the spam why'd you want to get the forums off the homepage, but i feel like that will be another punch to the forums in general. People are not going to regularly click the forums button to see if something catches their eye. I guess that's the job of the community highlights page now, but i think it will be a blow to have threads appear during the week & not getting any action until the end of the week where they might get picked up by the community spotlight. At that point, the thread is a week old and either the OP or audience will move on from it. Instead of knowing that a new thread will be on everyone's homepage as soon as you post it , as is the case now. By making the forum worse for the bots, you also make it worse for the actual audience.

- I like the ideas presented & the problems it solves (especially the bombcast issues that were talked about) but the site lacks any character right now. There are a bunch of grey rectangles & white lines that just don't look great to me. The lack of border on the top gives you more screenspace to work with, but to what end? The featured video is huge now, but when you click to watch it, it still takes you to a seperate page to actually watch it. Instead of being able to watch it straight from the homepage as we are able to now. Now there's hardly any seperation from the top bar, to the huge video, to the top 50% of the three thumbnails underneath. It just makes it seem messy in comparison to the old site. That one has clearly defined sections. You get your big topbar, you get your videocontainer, you get your deck + comment info on the side & a nice shift from black to grey as you pass the 3 featured thumbnails. Now you have a huge video image, and all the other info is quarantined to the videopage. So in my eyes, the homepage serves less information and is somehow messier than the original to boot. With Netflix, the boxart tells you a lot about the content. With a lot of GB videos, the images tell you hardly anything. Especially bombcasts. You want that deck information to be there. I get that it might be ugly in this carousel view, but you at least want to showcase the decks on the homepage i feel. GB videos are not made to function as boxart, they require words.

- Finally, there's this very ugly default scrollbar at the video page for the deck section, but i've never seen a deck so large that you have to scroll to read it all. GB keeps it at most to 2 or 3 sentences. Why not get rid of that?

Edit: One last request. I know that this is sadly not possible for the older bombcasts, but lately they've been tagging games & various subjects to the bombcasts. Would it be possible to search for a game and get the bombcast served to which that game was tagged to? That would be a way more useful feature than having to google a release date for a game, and then sort of hope that it's part of this one bombcast episode from august 2014 and not the other one from august 2014. It's kinda hard to envision what this would look like , but i feel like you guys are filing podcasts under tags for some reason and that data could be used to surface the right podcast to the right person. Last time i wanted to listen to some Oddworld Strangers Wrath talk, i had to use google & click backwards through all the bombcasts to finally find 2 bombcasts that might be talking about it. After that i had to scroll around both bombcasts to listen what they're talking about. THERES GOT TO BE A BETTER WAYYYY :)

Again, thanks for the redesign & i love the whole show idea & how the bombcast now has 1 page for all it's versions. Perhaps the review section could have a similar design where the video & written part have a shared page?

After being able to log in, and mess around a bit, now the site won't load at all (error 500).

Firefox/Brave browsers, both white screen after log in. Staying logged out on Chrome and it seems to be working as intended.

I really wish "Premium Podcasts" would be broken up into their own show pages/categories. I'd love to look exclusively at Film & 40s episodes.

Make us proud.

Firefox 62.0.3 on Windows 10 - in the video overlay that appears if you hover your mouse over the player while it's paused, the description area on the far left has an errant vertical scroll bar:

@wcarle: Please do! You deserve it! Fantastic work to the whole team for the redesign.

@fixbane said:

https://www.giantbomb.com/hitman/3030-45150/videos/ seems like it serves your purpose well enough. Can't really view it like you would a formal show but given how it's all spread across many different kinds of videos I think that's probably the simplest option. I'm obviously not staff but having videos in multiple shows feels weird to me (not sure if it's even possible).

Maybe an option would be to have user-created shows or playlists? Similar to the current list system but integrated with the new video playback features. This would also allow people to collect stuff that doesn't really fit into the show format. I'm thinking about the older random 'around the office' videos that used to happen.

This is more of a UX issue and maybe it's just me but I'm not loving the way the navbar uses hover states, I find it leads to unintended opening and closing of nav menus.

nav menu video #1

nav menu video #2

Hey, I left this feedback on the reddit as well, putting it here too.

Old Games encompassing both random streams and Jeff Gerstmann Home Game seems off. I like random streams with multiple people in them. On the other hand I don't watch The Jeff Gerstmann Home Game. Putting them both in one category seems silly, especially when the Jeff Gerstmann Home Game is its own well established with a name that's right in the title.

Similarly, Premium Podcasts should be split up. First, because personally the only GB podcast I listen to outside of Overcast is Film & Forties, so it would make sense to subscribe to it and it alone. Second, because Film & Forties is a show unto itself and it, the Powerbombcast, and the Ryckert Family Podcast deserve the same treatment as Giant Bombcast Aftermath and any other show on the site, especially since they're the ones you're putting a premium on.

Small note, when Film and Forties is its own thing should change the seasons to be something like One Offs, Fast & The Furious, Nick Cage, and October 2018 or something since those three Film and Forties series are basically seasons.

A few of the podcasts should be moved to Archived Podcasts, but I'm sure yall know this. Not hard to miss Bombin the AM and Alt F-1 being there being strange.

Finally, I notice in the Shows view there are no tags on which series are premium. Maybe that's just because I'm a premium member, but seems weird to not seperate them a bit.

Edit: Oh, one more thing, the seasons in the GBE Playdate show leave a lot to be desired. For Unprofesh I feel it makes a lot of sense to just do years, but for Playdates Life is Strange, Contradiction, Until Dawn and Tender Loving Care should each be their own season so you can watch all of them in a row. Currently, there are Life is Strange episode in multiple seasons which isn't ideal.

It would be nice if the carousel/grid view saved between pages/refreshes.

No "Recent Forum Posts" element on the home page is a bummer for me. I use that a lot.

I don't know if this is still to come but there's a lack of cohesion to the way tabs look and work on things like the wiki and profile pages. They just look old when contrasted with how everything else looks.

I'm not sure what the "Archived Shows" thing is supposed to be. I think an "All Shows" (if that's what it is) would be better/more clear.

Other than that I think the new site is cool! Thanks for all the hard work, it all looks nice and fresh and I'm excited about the full debut.

Edit: Afer using it a bit more I have to be honest, I don't like everything on the front page being a carousel. I will always switch to a grid view if it's an option and not being able to easily see descriptions without having to click on and then pause (autoplaying videos are the worst) every video I'm curious about is less than ideal.

I'm no designer but I think I would like this kind of design more if instead of horizontal carousels taking up so much real estate you had verticle ones, side by side that had extra room for descriptions and such beside the videos. Or maybe larger box-shaped carousels with room for more videos at a glance with space for descriptions. If any of those are out of the question at least have it so the description shows up when hovering over a video.

I would also like it if the individual shows were shown in the drop-down menu at the top. Maybe having the "Shows" label at the bottom of the list and having the list of shows populate beneath it would be better for me.

I don't know, just a few uninformed thoughts. :)

When browsing episodes of a podcast or video via the carousel and grid view, there's seemingly no deck surfaced anywhere. I could see that being a big issue when trying to find older episodes of podcasts especially since I wouldn't be able to find a specific episode solely from its thumbnail. It's definitely still an issue for videos though, as decks can be more memorable than thumbnails for stuff like UPF.

You can click on an episode and it won't reload the page anymore but it will scroll the page up to the player to display the full information which is a tad more tedious than how it used to be for browsing.

Yeah I know the video page exists but it does not show off the videos the same way a regular Show page would to new people looking for connected series to watch. And since these vids are some of the best content the site has produced, that's a travesty. Especially since I'd say they were the backbone of it being the site's 2016 Game of the Year.

As for being in multiple show feeds, I'm not sure. Would just involve them pulling it out of the Quick Looks show page instead for the ones that might be in that. I checked Mario Party 10 and it seems to be in the MPP page but not the Quick Look page so they've done it that way already.

@fixbane: I agree, any ongoing content like that should be its own season at least. Same for the Life is Strange playdates, as well as the other similar playdate playthroughs.

@wcarle: I think the Shows page takes a step back from the old design. Hovering over the "Videos" tab at the top of the page and seeing a quick text list of shows is preferable to having to hover over Videos, click on Shows, then see a big chunky list with thumbnails you have to scroll through (imo).

Maybe you could copy over the old behavior in the new design by having the list of shows replace the Popular Videos and Latest Videos under the Videos tab when you hover over the Shows link. The user could still click on the Shows link to get to the page with the thumbnails.

Primarily a mobile user, and things look great. Except for a certain something. Though I think it's a feature, not a bug. While playing videos full screen, the thumbnail is in the background meaning on my galaxy s8 which has a wider/longer than normal screen when watching in landscape, the sides of video now have the thumbnail instead of black bars.

It's cool but also kind of weird. For example, Gotta God Hand is weird because the thumbnail has Jason and Ben on the side but they're also there in the video so it looks broken but pretty sure it's not. Not sure if I like it. Is there a way to put a toggle for it?

It would be nice if there were an option to filter videos by unwatched ones only. Sometimes I just want to check the latest instead of following any particular thing, but I don't want to browse through things that I have seen before.